Alfred's eyes slid down to her lips as she spoke. There was something fascinating and suddenly mesmerizing about them, though he couldn't say what. Without really thinking about it, he moved the hand he'd had against her cheek and reached out to touch them, gently and slowly tracing out the outline of her bottom lip. Maybe it was just a way to stop her from talking for a moment; maybe he was just drunk.

"I should've seen that coming," he said in response. He really should have. They'd ended up kissing because of course they had; he'd led her through a large and impressive ship, bragged about his experiences traveling the world, and then gotten her into an isolated room and wedged the two of them into a dimly lit corner, on a bed — not a particularly comfortable one, but a bed none the less. It wasn't as though there was anything else that could have logically followed that particular sequence of events, even if they hadn't already had the conversation in his cabin from the last time she'd been here. Even though the idea hadn't managed to occur to him yet, he'd essentially dragged it out and held it in front of her face as temptation. He did not seriously expect that Miss Zelda was the kind of girl who might see something she badly wanted within her grasp and not reach out to take it.

His eyes drifted down to her exposed neck, and he turned his hand over so that he could run the backs of his curled fingers along the exposed curve of it beneath her ear. "I wanted to kiss you, too," he admitted. "The first time you asked me to. I just knew I shouldn't."